This day in history: December 26, 1982

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When it was still in its infancy, the personal computer was named 'Man of the Year' by Time magazine

On Boxing Day in 1982, Time magazine named the personal computer its Man of the Year. It marked the first time a nonhuman won the accolade since the award's inception in 1927.

By Tiffany Crawford Vancouver Sun December 26, 2013

An Apple-1 computer,built in 1976, is displayed during First Bytes: Iconic Technology From the Twentieth Century, an online auction featuring vintage tech products at the Computer History Museum. On Boxing Day in 1982, Time magazine named the personal computer its Man of the Year.

On Boxing Day in 1982, Time magazine named the personal computer its Man of the Year. It marked the first time a nonhuman won the accolade since the award's inception in 1927.

Person of the Year, formerly called Man of the Year, is included in an annual issue of the American news magazine Time that once featured a person the editors felt had done the most to influence the year's events. Now, the magazine gives the award to "a person, couple, group, idea, place, or machine that for better or for worse ... has done the most to influence the events of the year."

To this day, the personal computer is the only machine to have won the award. The second non-human recipient - the planet Earth - was named in 1988.

In the late 1970s and early '80s, personal computers began showing up in homes, offices and schools. The Vancouver Sun began using them sometime between 1975 and 1976, but that was considered quite early even for offices. The PC revolution was still in its infancy and the vast majority of people still didn't own one.

But at the turn of the decade, sales began to spike. In 1981, 1.4 million home computers were sold in the U.S., and according to Time, that number doubled the following year. Early PC owners usually had to write their own programs and many computers lacked an operating system.

Some of the most notable first home computers were the MITS Altair 8800, which came out in 1975, the Apple II, Commodore PET and the IBM PC. Apple's famous Lisa computer was introduced shortly after the Machine of the Year article was published, and later the company brought out the MacIntosh, which Time calls "the PC industry's longestrunning, most influential line of computers."

Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs, The Definitive Biography, wrote that the founder of Apple computers cried when he saw the front cover because he thought he was going to be chosen as Man of the Year. Jobs had already appeared on the front cover of Time earlier that year, and went on to appear on the magazine's front page several times throughout his career. In November 2009, Fortune magazine picked Jobs as the CEO of the decade.

Tiffany Crawford stated, "Early PC owners usually had to write their own programs and many computers lacked an operating system."

I want to also include more reasons why vast majority of people did not own PCs in the 1970's to early 1980`s:

• The price was out of middle income earners range and if they could afford one they have to have plenty of time, be good with reading schematics, and expert use of soldering gun/iron.

• There was not much functionality for the purpose of owning one unless playing games which was another problem because library of game titles was very limited and expensive.

• Competition from ready built plug and play game platforms with impressive library titles of cartridges(game programs) for

- Atari 2600 released on September 11,1977

- ColecoVision released on August 1982

- Atari 2800 released on October 1983

Some reasons the spike of PC ownership in the mid-1980`s and present.

• Availability of programs like the Commodore 64, released in August 1982 was a successful true ready built PC platform which sold separately disk drive, monitor, printer, and etc. had impressive library titles of games on 5¼ square disks

• Universal standard operating system, things changed drastically when Microsoft founder Bill Gates bought and licensed to all PC manufacturers the PC standard operating system in the 1980`s to part of the 1990`s the MS DOS. I can go on with many reasons...

A clarification: Steve Jobs in Walter Issacson's biography of him didn't cry solely because he wasn't picked, he cried because the article written on him by Jay Cocks based on Michael Moritz's (who later founded Sequoia Capital, which provided funding to Tony Hsieh's Zapps) reporting.